Tårnby Park Performance Festival 2023 takes you on a journey through Tårnby with performance art as your guide.
When Tårnby Park Performance Festival 2023 opens on June 6, 2023, nothing will be quite the same. Since the first festival in 2021, Tårnby Park Studio, which creates the annual Tårnby Park Performance Festival, has been organizing performances, shows, workshops and other celebrations of communality in Tårnbyparken and its surrounding. This year, Tårnby Park Performance Performance Festival 2023, with the title “The beginning of a long journey”, has taken on a more nomadic character, spreading to the grocery stores, BASALT and Netto, Tårnby Library, Kastrup Strand and even the island of Saltholm. The festival’s guests will therefore embark on a journey in Tårnby’s local area to experience everything the festival organizers and artists have to offer.
From June 6-15, 2023, residents of Tårnby and guests from the surrounding area will have the opportunity to experience Danish and international performance art of high artistic quality up close in indoor and outdoor public spaces and in Tårnby Park’s residential park. Tårnby Park Performance Festival 2023 offers community-oriented days filled with many surprises, performance art, barbecue fun, theater, sociality, open grill and workshops for children, young people and adults. Tårnby Park Performance Festival ends on Thursday 15 June with a program aimed at the theatre, visual arts and performing arts industry. The industry day starts with the panel debate “Soft Clashes” about institution building and the clash between visions and reality, moderated by Morten Goll from Trampolinhuset. Participants include Gylleboverket (Malmö), På den anden side (Møn), Kinéo 37 (Odsherred) and Nexus Dance Company (Copenhagen). Some of the participants are at the beginning of the work of creating institutions and transforming visions into reality, while others look back on years of practice.
Tårnby Park Performance Festival is organized every year by Tårnby Park Studio, a project space for local, social and international entanglements, where different festival formats, performances, performance evenings, films, debates and different institutional frameworks in Tårnby are explored.
In addition to highlighting and presenting Danish and international performance art, Tårnby Park Performance Festival is also a performance in itself and a creator of new artistic research. The festival always has a built-in question that the festival’s research and content revolves around. This year, everyone involved from organizers to artists to the audience is invited to reflect on the theme of the journey and what the journey does to and means for a body and a society.
A good number of the activities are free, but tickets are required for some shows and performances. A ticket costs between DKK 25-200 per person. A festival pass for DKK 400 gives access to all shows and performances.
The long journey starts outside Tårnby Library on June 6, where Proletar Teater has settled down with the project SAGA, which is half shop, half theater. Here, the group collects discarded textiles, which they sew into bags that are available for purchase and you can take with you to the festival. With the purchase of a bag, you get a story about the textile’s previous owner, where the textile has been before and where it comes from, which you can make up or replace with your own personal story. Who knows, maybe one day you’ll pass on your newly purchased bag to someone else who wants to hear your story?
From Tårnby Library, the journey continues to Kastrup Strand, where Nexus Dance will perform from June 9-11. Out in the Øresund on the island of Saltholm, a small group of ticketed guests can experience dancer Neda Kovinic and her team of movement and sound artists from Serbia and England on June 10 at 15:15, who have traveled from abroad to Saltholm and through dance present their previous research and experiences on the small island. “Traveling Bodies” is a site-specific performance and encounter between four dancers and musicians and the local nature and traffic infrastructure. Neda Kovinic and her dancers can be experienced again on June 15 at 19:30, when her performance travels to Tårnbyparken and takes on a new form. This will take place indoors in the Tårnbyparken community center.
From outdoor performances on Kastrup Strand and the island of Saltholm, the journey returns to downtown Tårnby, where the audience can experience a performance and dance by Karin Bergman and her dancers along the entrance and aisles of the grocery stores, Basalt on Amager Landevej on June 9 at 16:00 and Netto at Tårnby Station on June 10 at 13:00 and 14:00.
At various locations in Tårnby, you may be lucky enough to run into Emil Torp-Rasmussen and Anna-Sofia Lillian Chonovitsch, who carry around a canvas and invite passers-by to paint their thoughts about Tårnby and their wishes for the city’s future. “A Tårnby State of Mind”, as the project is called. When the two artists are not in the district, Emil Torp-Rasmussen, Anna-Sofia Lillian Chonovitsch and the canvas will be in Tårnbyparken on June 9, 13, 14 and 15 and at Tårnby Library (start) and Tårnby Torv (end) on June 10. The large joint painting, which they call “a collective painting for the future”, will be auctioned to the highest bidder on June 15 at 3 pm in Tårnbyparken.
In addition to and alongside the performance art program, you can join the communal dining in Tårnbyparken when Tårnby Park Studio invites you to Open Grill from 13-15 June at 17.30-19. It is free to participate and only requires that you bring your own disposable grill and the food you want to grill and eat. Drinks and cake can be purchased from the festival bar.
On June 9 from 16-22, Tårnby Park Studio invites you to a garden party to mark the official opening of Tårnby Park Performance Festival 2023. The garden party is the festival’s major gathering point, where guests can meet each other and dance to happy music until the sun goes down, eat their food with others, children (and adults) can participate in creative activities and interested parties can participate in the day’s performance art program.